AFL-CIO Government Affairs Representative Tom Trotter says the labor federation was hopeful it could work with Trump on at least one thing – a trillion dollar infrastructure investment.

But with only $200 billion in real federal money on the table in the Trump budget, it looks like any infrastructure investment from Congress will fall short of what’s really needed.

Trotter says the American Society of Civil Engineers does regular reports on the cost of our failure to act on U.S. infrastructure. The engineers say America needs a $4.6 trillion dollar infrastructure investment to properly rebuild U.S. infrastructure.

[Tom Trotter]: “What they showed this March was $4.6 trillion need to bring our infrastructure – all components of it – up to a state of good repair. So a trillion dollars was in the right ballpark to get things moving.

It’s a big task ahead. But we are all about creating not just jobs, but good jobs and middle class jobs, career jobs. And one way to do that is through fixing our infrastructure.

Not just the construction side of things but operationally – the transit workers – and the supply side. If we’re buyin’ U.S. steel and other components for these projects, it’s also creating jobs. So it’s one of these that should be a win-win-win all the way around.”

The American Society of Civil Engineers say failure to act to invest in this rebuild of roads and bridges will cost America $3.9 trillion in lost Gross National Product by 2025.

If we fail to act it will also cost America 2.5 million jobs and $7 trillion in lost business sales by 2025.

[Tom Trotter]: “It’s staggering. And the reality is we’re already suffering from that.

Because of the state of our infrastructure right now we’re already not gaining the jobs we should, our economic growth is constrained because of the state of our infrastructure. You can’t move goods across the country efficiently. Our competitiveness is suffering.

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